I met Nirmal several years ago in New York. I had become increasingly interested in the lives of undocumented laborers in the city, and therefore had started talking with taxi drivers, kebab sellers, and restaurant workers. I was looking for answers to two questions, the first of which was what might happen if illegal immigrants from South Asia should ever want to retire in the United States?
This is a relatively new issue, as the vast majority of South Asian immigrants to the States arrived after 1970. My parents, educated professionals who came to New York in 1979, are South Asian-Americans who can leverage their hyphens into a comfortable retirement: escaping to India for the cold winter months and spending summer in the United States with their children and grandchildren. Precisely because of their class and professional background, immigrants like my parents can afford to look forward to retiring.
But what of other, less celebrated, but equally crucial South Asian immigrants: those who come to the United States to man our 7-11s and wash our plates? Their lives are spent doing the jobs American citizens refuse to do, but they have no savings, no retirement plan, no assurance that they’ll even be able to eat the day they stop working. What happens as they age in this lonely and brutal existence?
Secondly, I wondered what continued to pull so many undocumented South Asians to the United States, despite the fact that their lives in places like New York were seemingly miserable: backbreaking work, 14-hour workdays, difficult living situations. Why was the U.S. still called the sunehra desh – the golden country – by so many of the people to whom I spoke?
Nirmal was one of the friends that I made while exploring these ideas. We met while he was the head chef at a mediocre Indian restaurant in Queens. Both of us spoke broken Hindi, my native tongue being Bengali and his being Nepali, but we managed to communicate.
Over time, Nirmal told me his story. He was from a lower middle-class family in Kathmandu, married off as soon as he was 20. But a year or so into his marriage, things began to look bleak. He could not find employment, and there was a baby on the way. And then, a miracle: the tourist visa to the United States for which he had applied months earlier came through. A plane ticket bought. A journey taken. A life ended. A life begun. Fourteen years passed.
Nirmal’s daughter, whom he has never met, is now a teenager. With the money that he faithfully sends to his wife every week via Western Union, she has been able to purchase a flat in a posh part of town. She sends their daughter to a relatively expensive school, where the girl is learning to speak English. Nirmal listed the luxuries his family has been able to afford on his meager salary as if he were reading a list of groceries. That’s when I realized that these things are not tangible to Nirmal because he has never seen them. What, I asked him, made him take such a substantial percentage of his paycheck each week and send it to two women he doesn’t even know very well?
“What else am I here for?” was his response. Nirmal lives in a hovel in Queens, jammed into a two-bedroom apartment with three other men. His hours are so long that by midnight his feet are sore, his back is killing him. All this for about $500 a week, a small part of which he keeps for his daily expenses. But what is the option?
“There is nothing for me back in Nepal,” he said. “There are no job opportunities there. Better to suffer here and let my child live in peace. Maybe because of me, she will have a better life.”
These motivations are not so different from those of my own parents, who came to America following prestigious job opportunities and with the desire to send their children to the best universities. But the similarities end there. Among other privileges, my parents can hop on flights and cross borders at will; a luxury I inherited even more irrevocably by being born in America. Nirmal cannot leave the boundaries of the United States if he ever wants to go to Nepal.
Both Nirmal and I were highly aware of this divide as we spoke, and we were careful never to mention it, until the day I told him that I was thinking of going to Nepal. I brought it up gingerly, wondering how he might react. He asked me only this: “Why?”
How could I tell him that meeting him had left me with even more questions than I had before? I once heard Nirmal talking to his wife on the phone. The way he reassured her that everything was fine, the way he evaded questions about himself – it made me wonder, why was Nirmal so hesitant to let his family know about his life here? After all, if he told them the truth, then the answer to the retirement question would be rather simple: Nirmal would work in the United States as long as his body allowed him to, and then he would deport himself back to Nepal to retire in a life of semi-luxury.
But this was not an option. The day I mentioned this plan to Nirmal, he laughed at me; a deep, sarcastic laugh that made me feel the depth of my own naïveté. He did not explain himself, but I understood that day that going home would be considered a failure on his part.
This was when I started thinking about a trip to Nepal. If Nirmal was lying to his family about how wonderful his life was, how many like him were doing the same? How many families in Nepal still believe that if they are able to send their sons to America, all their problems will be solved? I also wanted to know what Nirmal’s family thought might happen when he was too old to work anymore. To answer these questions, I knew I had to go and meet them myself.
I told Nirmal none of this. I said that I was going for some work, and would love to meet up with his family while I was there. Before I left, Nirmal handed me a new iPad. It must have cost him everything he had.
“Please,” he asked, “give this to my daughter. She has a computer but the picture quality is so bad, I’m never able to properly Skype with her. Maybe with this, I’ll be able to see her face.”
Suddenly, my trip felt wrong. I felt like handing him back the iPad, along with my tickets and my passport.
“You should be the one going to see them,” I wanted to say. Instead I slid the iPad into my bag.
Nirmal’s entire extended family came to greet me in Kathmandu and his wife invited me to her house for dinner. They hugged me and wept, saying they couldn’t believe that a friend of Nirmal’s was sitting in their living room. I realized that this might as well have been Nirmal’s “welcome home” party. It felt perverse that for them, it was my arrival that was tantamount to his homecoming. I found that the questions I had been examining had led me to yet another: what did it mean for me as an American to be the go-between for Nirmal and his family? It felt senseless that by sheer accident of birth, I was able to eat his wife’s chicken curry, and I was able to hug his daughter.
I gave her the iPad and explained its use. Exceedingly shy, she took it and hid behind her mother.
“What is she going to do with this?” Nirmal’s wife asked while laughing out loud. “She’s perfectly capable of Skyping with her father on the computer. She just doesn’t ever want to speak to a strange man she doesn’t know!”
Stunned, I realized that of course Nirmal had been wrong about the computer. Of course he had been spared being told that his daughter didn’t want to speak to him.
But those weren’t the only lies being tossed about. Rapidly, I was filling in pieces of the puzzle. When I asked them about Nirmal’s retirement, his wife looked at me as though I were an idiot.
“Hasn’t Nirmal told you about the court case?”
I looked at her blankly.
“You see, Nirmal being in America has been wonderful for us. But how long can a family remain apart? This is why Nirmal has been fighting the court case. See, in America, they don’t put such an emphasis on family. He has been explaining to them that in Nepal, the family unit is very strong, and he needs his family with him. Any day now, he will convince them, and we will go to America to be with him. We will settle our daughter down there, and we will come back and live in Nepal and visit her often in America.”
I sat in silence for a moment, at last comprehending why Nirmal had never explained to his wife that his retirement would inevitably mean his own deportation, and had instead been fanning the flames of this hideous lie. Who could bear to shatter such a mammoth and intricate deception? Who could bear to rob a woman of this kind faith? And who could bear to live in a world in which the simple truth is, “I was poor then, and I’m still poor now?”
I finally understood Nirmal’s deep-throated laughter the day I had asked him about the end of his own career. The sound had borne the weight of this double-edged sword: the knowledge that he carried versus the myth he perpetuated. I understood too that Nirmal would never leave the United States as long as he can prolong this fantasy, because his final homecoming will, in the end, be marked not by a joyous reunion, but rather by the bitter disappointment of a life sacrificed.
Maybe most importantly, I understood that I too would have to tell Nirmal my own lies about how my trip to his hometown had gone. But perhaps sometimes it is the glossy coating of fiction that keeps the walls of our various realities from crumbling.
Piyali Bhattacharya is a freelance journalist currently based in New Delhi. She is working on her first novel.
